WORKING IN KENYA :: THE CHALLENGE ::

Things don't go slow in our offices… Likoni changed its management in January and Bombolulu is doing the same as we speak… that means lots of new faces, young faces with new ideas, they all want to make more money and if that means working overtime then they're up for it… Not really what we expected a Kenyan work environment would be but hey, we're not complaining, the busiest the better but first impressions are not always right and what we have experience this last months changes every day... people start showing their true colors and day by day we experience how a real Kenyan work environment is really like.

So far we've done a lot of things we weren't hired for but that's part of the job right? lot's of graphic adds for newspapers, magazines and newsletter... a lot to be done here and there's a lot we could do in a year or two… Another thing we also like is the location, yeah, yeah, the commute is long to Likoni but worth it a couple of days… crossing the ocean every morning busts my day and everything is full of trees in the compound, outside is a different story but while I'm at work nothing gets boring… if I get tired of computer work then I just walk to the wood workshop, say hi to all the carpenters and take a look at what they are doing and if I don't want to do that then I just take a walk through the gardens until I get a view of the sea… I stay there a bit, just watching the water, relax and then head back to the office for some more computer stuff…

Bombolulu is quite the same, the head office of APDK is in Bombolulu compound, as well as a rehabilitation clinic, the wheelchair factory and the cultural center. There's even a tour that shows you around, in the tour you can see a few Kenyan traditional housings, an organic farm, a walk around the workshops where you'll see disabled people doing handcrafts and at the end of the tour you'll experience some traditional dancing... this happens most days, it's tourist season so it's really never boring, people coming and going and lots of fun places to clear the mind...

Work also comes by the loads in both places and the same problems arrive... for starters everything is urgent, I bet it wasn't urgent when they found out they had to do that but they always forget until the last day and of course we are the ones who have to hurry... we both have refused to do some stuff at the last minute, I know we are in Kenya but our design process is still the same and we will not lower our design level just to have things done. We really appreciate good design and at the end we came here to improve the way they think about it and if we lower our level just to make something faster then we're really not accomplishing our goal.

We both think design can change lives but that's not the case here, we have had to explain to them that design is not grabbing stuff from magazines, or producing everything that comes to mind...brainstorming is something unusual, they tend to produce everything they come up with, Likoni for example has more that 20 product lines and Bombolulu, oh my God, they have more that 10000 products just in the jewelry workshop and they are 4 workshops in total... it's hard to make people understand but if we keep insisting we believe someone will understand soon... Marketing strategies are also a different story, there are none! so that's another challenge.

Besides the urgent stuff we both will start working together on a wheelchair for children with paralysis which is a very cool project to work on and has lots of potential. So far they have finished a prototype for one which was taken from a German design, lots of controversy so we decided to give them a hand and make something new, not copied, a big challenge though so we'll see how that goes. That's all for today so remember to write once in a while!